Balancing Enterprise Security and Employee Productivity

Balancing Enterprise Security and Employee Productivity

Information security has traditionally revolved around keeping the “good guys” in and the “bad guys” out. Taking a page from the medieval playbook, security professionals have tirelessly built higher virtual walls, deeper digital moats, and more capable gatekeepers to suppress nefarious individuals and their cyber armaments.

But times have changed, and it is no longer possible to fully separate the good from the bad.

With the rise of enterprise mobility, real-time collaboration, cloud computing, and application-driven services, data is flowing in and out of corporate networks more freely than ever before.

These trends present a wealth of opportunity for employee productivity and operational efficiency, but they also provide new openings and vulnerabilities for malware and other threats which have become more pervasive and sophisticated. The barrier to entry for malicious actors has fallen, requiring far less in-depth technical knowledge to cause broad ranging harm.

It Intel IT, we accepted and embraced this reality a few years ago with our “protect to enable” strategy. It’s a novel approach to enterprise security, built on the implicit assumption that compromise is inevitable. Instead of attempting to shutter all vulnerabilities and thwart all attacks, it focuses on flexibility and survivability. Balance is the key.

Information security has traditionally revolved around keeping the “good guys” in and the “bad guys” out. Taking a page from the medieval playbook, security professionals have tirelessly built higher virtual walls, deeper digital moats, and more capable gatekeepers to suppress nefarious individuals and their cyber armaments.

But times have changed, and it is no longer possible to fully separate the good from the bad.

With the rise of enterprise mobility, real-time collaboration, cloud computing, and application-driven services, data is flowing in and out of corporate networks more freely than ever before.

These trends present a wealth of opportunity for employee productivity and operational efficiency, but they also provide new openings and vulnerabilities for malware and other threats which have become more pervasive and sophisticated. The barrier to entry for malicious actors has fallen, requiring far less in-depth technical knowledge to cause broad ranging harm.

It Intel IT, we accepted and embraced this reality a few years ago with our “protect to enable” strategy. It’s a novel approach to enterprise security, built on the implicit assumption that compromise is inevitable. Instead of attempting to shutter all vulnerabilities and thwart all attacks, it focuses on flexibility and survivability. Balance is the key.